


The End Of The Show As We Know It: X-Files, "Two Fathers" / "One Son"

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [15]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, Two Fathers, mythology arc, one son
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-07-22
Packaged: 2018-02-09 23:29:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2002200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It came to me as I was rewatching “One Son”: This is where the show should have ended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The End Of The Show As We Know It: X-Files, "Two Fathers" / "One Son"

This, right here, is my favorite moment from the mid-season mythology arc, “Two Fathers” / “One Son.” Cancer Man and Diana Fowley, who we now know for sure is working with him, are staring at the big bright light shining through those opening hangar doors, and they know that what’s about to come through it is not their free ticket out of the upcoming alien colonization of earth. They know it’s the faceless rebels back there, come to wipe out the consortium of conspirators; and they know enough to back up slowly and then run like the rats they are.

The conspirators, oddly, don’t run, even after they’ve figured out what’s going on. They stand there looking into the light, then form a circle with their families inside. The faceless rebels naturally surround them and then torch everyone. Why the hell don’t they just run the fuck away, like Diana and C.G.B.? It’s the kind of thing that can only be explained allegorically. In a story about colonization which has already brought up the white colonization of North America through “Anasazi”/ “Blessing Way”, it does make some sense that what kills these old white guys in the end is their falling back on the same strategy that their literal and spiritual ancestors used when under attack by the indigenous peoples that  _their_ genocidal and enslaving colonial enterprise was displacing: circling the wagons.

It came to me as I was rewatching “One Son”: This is where the show should have ended. To the extent that Chris Carter ever had an endgame in mind for the mythology, this was obviously it. The mythology does still show signs of having been made up as CC went along. You can see that in the increasingly tight focus on the reproductive nightmare. In the first few seasons, we spend a fair amount of time with male abductees (Dwayne Barry, Max Fennig), but gradually the alien/human hybrid project comes together and all the abductees are women whose fertility is being manipulated in order to produce this hybrid. In “Two Fathers,” Cancer Man takes an annoyingly long time to lay it all out: alien colonists who contacted the powers that be on Earth in the 1950s recruited a select group of powerful men (they’re all men) as collaborators. They were supposed to help pave the way for the alien colonization of earth by creating a race of alien-human hybrids that could serve as slaves after the 100% Pure Humans were killed by the virus—the black oil introduced in “Piper Maru”—which is the alien colonists’ life force or essence (a very sickly Marita Kovarrubias explains that they call it “purity,” which explains perhaps the use of the phrase “purity control” to describe the green stuff that Mulder and Scully find in that lab in “Ehrlenmyer Flask”). The bees that are being cultivated in so many of these mythology episodes (I’ve always loved the way Kovarrubias said the phrase “bees…or bee husbandry”) were somehow going to be involved in delivering this virus, and smallpox vaccinations are connected to that in some way that I can’t quite recall…but anyway. The second generation of conspirators (Cancer Man’s cohort) gave up their family members as hostages in order to get the aliens to let them continue working on this hybrid project. While fooling around with that, the consortium is also working on a vaccine for the black oil, which explains why the Russians are squirting black oil all over unconsenting ‘test’ subjects in that Siberian rathole in “Tunguska”/”Terma.” But all that goes into the toilet in Two Fathers/One Son, when a group of “faceless rebels” from another planet (first introduced in “Patient X”) scotch the alien colonists’ plans by torching all the human collaborators. The project is over; Cassandra, the first successful alien/human hybrid, is apparently dead; the consortium is toast; and Jeffrey Spender, having seen the error of his ways, gets Mulder and Scully back on the X-Files just before being shot in the basement office by a VERY disappointed Cancer Man.

OK, clearly that is all still pretty complicated, and a lot of it actually kind of doesn’t make sense. Again, for it to mean anything you have to read it allegorically as a tale about how America got into the pit of disillusionment and despair in which it currently wallows. The Greatest Generation, while apparently saving the world, secretly sold future generations out to the enemy. All that's left for the following generation--the men who come of age in the 1960s--is the cynical perpetuation of their elders' project, along with the silence that 'protects' ordinary citizens. Having killed everything about the 1960s that looked as if it might offer some hope for the future (in "Memoirs of a Cigarette-Smoking Man," we are told that Cancer Man is responsible for assassinating both JFK and Martin Luther King Jr.), these guys then betray their own families in 1973--while Nixon flails about in search of a way out of the scandal he's built for himself. Now old men, this generation of turncoats, assassins, and plutocrats have been controlling the world from their secret locations and preventing the best efforts of heroes of the younger generation (Fox Mulder, etc.) from ever amounting to much. This story of how fathers ruin their sons is, in a limited way, anti-patriarchal, which perhaps explains its extra function as an allegory for the struggle for reproductive rights: a cabal consisting exclusively of powerful white men seeks to control the fertility of women for their own ends, so that even an independent, autonomous, kick-ass modern woman like Scully can't make her own decisions about whether, when or how to have children. 

On a literal level, some of this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's not clear why these aliens need human scientists to help them develop the hybrids, nor why they're patient enough to wait fifty years. It's not clear why the faceless rebels sometimes seem to want to kill Cassandra Spender and sometimes seem to want to save her. It's not clear whether the faceless rebels are in fact a different species from the shape-shifting alien colonists. They appear to have many of the same features: green bubbling blood, can only be killed via an ice pick to the back of the neck, the ability to adopt anyone's appearance. But the whole thing about their orifices being sewn shut so the black oil can't get in...I'm sorry, no. How are they eating? How are they breathing? How are they shitting? And how are they making the disguises that people keep peeling off? Personally I've always thought that Chris Carter liked the sewn-up-face look that he came up with for an early episode of "Millennium" and decided he'd get a couple more uses out of it.

But plausibility aside, CC has actually made a good faith effort to tie all the loose ends together here. Nearly every major mythology episode contributes something to this plot, though often the only way they can convey that is by having Cancer Man explain it to us. And with the death of the conspirators, and the failure of the alien colonists, we are as close to closure as you figure this show would let us get. All we need is for Mulder and Scully to kiss and we can all go home.

So really, CC could have wrapped this show up in 5 seasons. The season 5 mythology is basically a stalling tactic and does not affect the overall arc. He really had five seasons’ worth of material for this story arc. And really, I think that if he had skipped season 5 and gone straight to 6, it would have been better. The only Season 5 episodes I would miss at all are “Bad Blood” and “Folie a Deux.”

But CC wants that goose to keep laying golden eggs. So at the end of Season 6 he has to start up a new mythology plot line involving that goddamned spacecraft crashed on the African coast. 

That arc was just a hot mess; and now I understand why. It was an artificial extension of a story line that should have ended here. There was no organic reason for it, and it didn’t emerge naturally from the show itself; so naturally there was no coherence and it was riddled with cliches.

As the end of the show, these two episodes would have been a mixed bag as far as Mulder and Scully go. We do get to see them shower together. But Mulder, in “One Son,” seems unusually passive (especially during and after his confrontation with Cancer Man in Fowley’s apartment). Learning the truth about the colonization plan just takes all the bounce out of his bungee; all he can think about now is getting himself and his near and dear out to El Rico so that they personally can ride out the alien apocalypse. (I asked it then and I’ll ask it now: Why doesn’t anyone notify Mulder’s mother about the escape plan? Or Scully’s?) Scully’s the one who has to save his ass by reminding him that there’s one last chance to do what they  _should_ be doing, which is trying to save the human fucking race.

But then Scully’s writing in “One Son” is weird too. Especially weird is that little scene with the Lone Gunmen where she tries to tell Mulder that Fowley is up to no good. Its placement is jarring—the last thing we saw, Mulder was wandering the corridors of the containment facility wearing ill-fitting clothes; we don’t find out how they were discharged or why; and suddenly everyone’s at the Lone Gunmen’s apartment. When Scully tells Mulder that if he’s going to trust Fowley she can’t help him any more, he accuses her of “making this personal.” She snaps that it  _is_  personal, because “without the FBI, personal interest is all I have.” Really? Uh…I mean…aren’t you interested in…the human fucking race?

Ah well. Anyway, my point is: if the show had ended here, it would have gone out...not at the top of its game, but at least with dignity, and with all the characters we love still in place, and still making some sense. 

Alas.


End file.
